Assignment time at school is fairly boring, for the most part, for a teacher. Students have lots to do, you need to be available to help on demand but there is a fair bit of sitting around waiting to be needed:

I had found a bunch of PDF’s explaining briefly how to fold parts of what I had assumed would eventually be a dragon. After trial folding the head and a foot I thought it was something I could do in stages. I (arbitrarily) decided my “standard square” would be the biggest cut from an A3 page. Most parts were then made using this standard.

Origami purists would probably have issues with this design, as there is an element of paper craft in some of the details, the head, for instance, is actually 1 standard square and 6 other bits of paper, folded and (shhh) glued in place. The body was made from 7 separate standard squares, 6 of which were the same, the tail segment was a little different to create the fan end.

Originally I folded the leg/shoulder using a standard square, but decided they were too big for the proportions of the model, so used A4-derived squares and am happier with the size.

There is LOTS of detail here – the head has a lovely mouth, teeth on upper and lower jaws, whiskers and 9 horns, fabulous. The feet have lovely long toes, sharp claws and some nice scaley edges.

The final assembly is a bit of a papercraft exercise. the body segments are joined (the seam is part of the design), then rolled and joined to the spine fin line making a long tube. I slipped rolled paper and a thick wire through the middle for posing purposes later and to give the body some sense of volume. Attaching the leg/shoulder is about working out where and what angle looks best, then glue and clamp until stable. Fixing the head was done after I twisted the body into a spiral pose, then grafted the raw edge of the body into the hidden crevasses of the head.

The final model is pretty spectacular, but feels a little cheaty alongside my folded Ryu Jin (folded by me over a period of a year), but there are many similarities – the “modular” or multi-piece construction solves many of the hideously complicated design issues of teasing all details out of a single uncut sheet. Pretty happy with it though.